Magic: The Gathering (repost)

[Unicron]

Well, having made some progress sorting through the last upgrades I bought, I decided to finally repost the old thread. I still enjoy Magic, although I've been reading a lot of comments archived on the Wizards forums about the changes made to the core rules when the 2010 set was released in summer. Most of them were not that minor, but two - the removal of mana burn, and several changes to how combat works - have been the subject of heated debate.

I'm somewhat on the fence myself, and for purposes of this thread I'll just stick to what I'm familiar with. The key thing in terms of the debates has to do with the fact that Magic is a strategy game, and many players feel WotC is potentially screwing up that core aspect.

The basic premise of Magic is simple: each player is a spellcaster, and the goal is to defeat the other spellcasters. Players start with a life bar of 20 points in most versions, and you're considered dead when it's down to 0. You have a selection of creatures and spells with which to win, and you need lands to power them. Most of the cards fall into one of the five colors, each of which represents a particular form of natural magic. Those that don't are called colorless, and are usually artifacts, artifact creatures (which count as both), and nonbasic lands. Some cards may share more than one color.

Black:

Black is the color of ambition, darkness, and decay. It is determined to win at any cost, and excels in being able to kill creatures directly or weaken them, or alternatively to resurrect them under your control. Black's major weakness is that it has little against artifacts or spells, and some of its more powerful spells are costly to the player for the benefits they provide. Black's symbol is the skull and its land is the swamp. It tends to ally with blue and red.

Blue:

Blue is the color of intelligence, manipulation, and the elemental forces of air and water. There are many creatures from those respective realms in Blue, and it can counter an opponent's spells or force his creatures back to his hand. Blue requires more micro-management than the other colors, and can therefore be somewhat difficult to play. Its reliance on card manipulation can be an advantage or disadvantage. Blue's symbol is a teardrop and its land is the island. It usually allies with black and white.

Green:

Green represents the natural world and its organic beauty. It is both attractive and deadly, and specializes in big creatures. Green is the juggernaut, able to put a lot of damage on the table. However, it is somewhat limited beyond this strategy, and can run into trouble against flying creatures. If the Green charge is halted by good defenses, the player must be ready to try and keep some momentum. Green's allies are red and white, and its symbol is the tree. Its land is the forest.

Red:

Red is almost the polar opposite of both Green and Blue. It shares Green's gift for high damage, but can focus it more directly against creatures or players (and sometimes both). Where Green emphasizes the organic part of life, Red represents the inorganic ones - hard stone and blazing fire. Like Blue it can also do a bit of manipulation, but lacks the method inherent in Blue's madness. Red acts because it enjoys action, and its fierce attacks can be deadly if they're managed correctly; if they're not, the Red player can leave himself overextended. Its land is the mountain and its symbol is the flame. Red allies with black and green.

White:

White is the philosophical opposite of Black. It represents light, order, and protection. White is very good at disabling spells or creatures, and tends to field smaller creatures that have weaker strength but higher versatility. Its weakness is that this defensive emphasis makes survival easier, but not gaining the initiative. White's symbol is the sun, and its land the plain. It allies with green and blue.





Here are some sample cards to show the formatting. It varies slightly by card type, but they're all similar. At the top is the card name and the mana cost, if it's a spell. Even creatures count as spells until they come into play (on older cards the descriptor is "summon creature"), and the mana cost shows how many lands you need to play that card. The Paragon needs a forest and a land of any other type, for a cost of 2.

Below the art is the card descriptor, which is the spell or creature type, and a deck symbol. The shape of the symbol shows which deck this version of the card comes from, and the color represents its rarity. Black symbols indicate commons, silver uncommons, gold rares, and in 2010 a copper color denotes a "mythic" rare.

Generally, non-creature spells fall into several categories. Enchantments affect some aspect of play, and stay on the board until something removes them or the target dies. Global Enchantments affect a whole group ("all creatures get +1/+1") while Auras (local enchantments in older terminology) affect specific cards ("enchanted creature gains flying"). Instants produce a short term effect and then go into the graveyard; they can be played at any time. Sorceries function the same way, but can only be played during the controller's turn.

Any rules related to the card appear below the artwork, along with flavor text. Creatures have a set of numbers in the lower right corner which control how powerful they are. The first number is the creature's power, or how much it deals in combat. The second is its toughness, or how much it can take before dying. The Bramblewood Paragon is 2/2 base, but would be more powerful in the company of another Paragon thanks to its boosting abilities.

[Unicron]

I'd had a second post written, but the board ate it. I'll probably post it tomorrow instead.

[RJDiogenes]

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. If you use Firefox, it can sometimes preserve the text you were writing if you choose "Restore Old Session" on rebooting.

[Unicron]

Nah, I use Safari. Trying this again. Here are some of the game mechanics.

A typical deck size is 60 cards, and a typical hand size is 7. Your draw deck is called the library, and the discard deck is the graveyard. It's where dead creatures and used spells go. In general, anything that is not a land is a spell; even creatures are considered a form of summoning spell before they're put into play, and this was a common feature on older cards. The creature descriptor would be "summon creature." Non-creature spells fall into one of several categories:

Tapping and Untapping

As I mentioned above, you need land to act as the power source for your spells. It is the source of the raw magical energy which fuels everything. So when you want to activate a land to play a spell or creature, you tap it by turning it sideways. If the land is your battery, this is like turning it on. Creatures are likewise tapped when you attack with them, but can't block while tapped, or to trigger specific abilities. Most creatures have what's called summoning sickness when they're initially played, which simply means they can't attack that turn. They can block and use triggered abilities though. When it cycles back to your turn again, you can untap things.

As mentioned, I'm ignoring the loss of mana burn for purposes of this thread. It's not something that's as likely to occur in casual play vs. tournament play, but personally I kind of agree that it was silly to remove it.

Mana burn occurs when you tap more lands than you can safely use, and you get feedback in the form of damage to your life bar. Let's say I'm playing Black and I want to put a creature on the board, but he costs 2 mana and I only have one swamp available. I have the Dark Ritual spell in my hand, which is an Instant that gives me 3 extra black mana. It costs 1 to play, so I use it to get the mana for my creature. But now I still have 1 extra mana left over to use up, and I either have to play another card that costs 1 mana or take a point of damage from mana burn. It is possible to build many strategies around the use of mana burn, including forcing it on opponents by playing spells that increase mana for everyone.

The Stack

This one was a biggie in the Great 2010 Debates. Specifically, many players dislike the removal of combat damage from The Stack. I'll get to that in a minute. The concept of The Stack was introduced with 6th Edition in 1999, and helped to streamline the original system which was a bit clunkier. It is a very important part of the game engine, and takes a little getting used to but is easy to learn.

Let's say I'm playing Green against Red. I attack with a big creature that's powerful, and you respond by shooting a fire spell at it. In turn, I play a Giant Growth spell to make it bigger and ensure it goes through, and these effects resolve in the order of most recently played (so my boosting spell might easily allow my attack to succeed against your counterspell, or you might play another response to defeat it), and this order of resolution is what we call The Stack. It allows a fairly simple way to handle complex reactions and let players plan strategies, and until 2010 the same system applied to how creature combat works.

The thing to keep in mind when attacking is that your creatures are always aiming for your opponent, and it's up to him how to respond. They will not fight other creatures unless blocked, and in those cases the numerical damage and abilities generally resolve appropriately. The big debate for 2010 had to do with the use of combat tricks, and particularly the fact that many players don't learn the Stack correctly or are too tempted to simply use tricks over and over. It is a valid concern, but personally I think it's more of a training and experience issue than a mechanical one.

The single most common example that came up is Mogg Fanatic. He's a red 1/1 goblin who has the ability to be sacrificed for 1 point of damage, and some players feel it's unintuitive to always play him as if you can use both his normal combat point and his sacrifice point, dealing 2 damage instead of 1. By the same token, one can argue against regularly bouncing a creature (returning it to your hand) to keep it from being killed.

On a purely personal level, I think there are cases where both of those strategies work, and some where they don't. I think Mogg Fanatic was intended to have both options available, and it's what separates him from other creatures like Prodigal Sorcerer, a blue card that's similar. The difference with the Sorcerer is that his damage ability is triggered, and you have to tap him to use it, therefore it's clearly a separate ability from when he goes into combat.

[RJDiogenes]

Well, I've never actually played, but it sounds like the system worked well and there were no overwhelming reasons to modify it....

[Unicron]

What Wizards has said is, they're mainly interested in drawing in new players. They've said that some things, such as having Mogg Fanatic do 2 damage in the manner I described above, might seem too confusing to a new player. And it's certainly true that there's a learning curve in the game. It's easy to make mistakes, and to misread how something works. I remember one veteran player describing a game with a new player who was playing Green, and who had a Llanowar Elves on the table. Green, due to its reliance on heavier creatures, tends to have a land management advantage to make it easier to afford them. LE is a little 1/1, but can be tapped to behave like an extra forest, and so you can use it like a land in that case. It has the forest symbol to represent that ability, but the new player thought that meant you could put a forest into play by tapping LE, which is not what it does. And that sort of thing is a training issue and not a mechanical issue.

The issues about removing combat damage from the stack haven't drawn as much direct ire as a change to the blocking system. This one has really gotten a lot of flak, and admittedly I think it's perhaps the worst of the changes. Under the older (6E) system, when creatures meet in combat, the defending player chooses his blockers, what attackers they're blocking, and the damage resolves appropriately. You could essentially do any number of effects per the Stack to alter the outcome of a given battle, if it's worth doing so. Under the newer system put in 2010, the attacking creatures are essentially forced to deal lethal damage to the first blocker before they can attack the next, rather than simply dealing whatever damage is appropriate to resolve the conflict as much as they'd like to within their strategy.

Naturally, this pissed off a lot of players because it means some combos will no longer work right - where they did a lot of damage before, they're weaker now or even ineffective. The new change is essentially like giving all of the attackers the trample principle, which not only seems strange but (in my mind anyway) takes away from that ability. Normally, when a stronger creature defeats a weaker creature, any extra damage simply vanishes. If however the attacker has Trample, that extra damage goes to the defender's controller instead. The principle is that tramplers have the power to all the way through the defenses, and this change is essentially forcing all attacks to try and work that way.

It hasn't helped that another ability, Deathtouch, has been said to be an exception to this rule. Creatures with Deathtouch kill anything that takes damage from them, even if that amount of damage wouldn't normally be lethal in terms of points. A fair number of players have naturally pointed out that if you need to make a special exception, then the change probably isn't all that great. And it certainly won't make the game easier for a new player to understand.

[RJDiogenes]

Sounds like, as with comics and so many other things, they're trying to dumb it down to make it more appealing to a larger number of people.

[Unicron]

That argument has certainly been made, vehemently by some, and I think there is some merit to the view that the new system is clearly more focused on creatures, whereas it's long been possible to build decks that are more heavily geared towards spells. I had a red/black deck built around that principle.

One last pair of mechanics to mention: counters and tokens. Counters are usually placed on a creature, and are a positive or negative effect like those granted by the Bramblewood Paragon. Occasionally there is an effect that places a counter on a given opponent, and if they earn a certain number they might lose. Some creatures come into play with a certain number of counters on them, and may have a base of 0/0 with their mechanics handling the addition or removal of the counters.

Tokens are objects representing a normal game object, usually a creature. They can be coins, dice, etc with dice being the most common, and they function like a normal card of that type would.

[Unicron]

Well, it's been nice to get some new stuff lately. Probably too much stuff. I'm trying to teach a friend to play.

[RJDiogenes]

So are you anywhere close to having a complete set of those cards? Or is that something you even aspire to?

[Unicron]

I've never really been that interested in "completeness." There are simply too many out there since the game is just shy of two decades old now, and I probably only ever get half or a third of the cards in a given set. Most players, myself included, just focus on using what we can acquire.

[RJDiogenes]

I'd probably become obsessed with having them all.

[Unicron]

One thing to always keep in mind with strategy games, particularly ones like Magic, is that it takes a bit of experience to be able to see the advantages of a given card. The current expansion (Rise of the Eldrazi) has drawn some criticism from players for some of its mechanics, and in my view is partly a symptom of the "gimmicky" direction that the game has been going in. The Elrazi are powerful creatures who reside in the space between dimensions, and have been accidentally released to threaten Zendikar, the world of the current block. There are very few actual Eldrazi in the decks, and they're ridiculously powerful compared to normal creatures. They're also ridiculously expensive, costing three or four times as much mana to put into play. To get them into play there is a new creature type called Eldrazi Drone, and these exist within the normal color spectrum as the Eldrazi themselves are colorless (but are not artifact creatures, which up to now were the only type of colorless creature). There are also several spells which create Drones, and these Drones can be sacrificed to produce the colorless mana needed to summon the Eldrazi.

I don't think the mechanic is necessarily bad, but I think it's poorly executed. There aren't very many actual Drones in the decks, with a lot of cards coming from previous decks, and I do think the Eldrazi are a bit overpowered. I think if they were less uber creatures and had a more balanced cost - still expensive but manageable, then the Drone method would be very useful. As it stands now, I don't have any particular incentive to put Eldrazi into my decks when I can use creatures and spells that are actually based around a particular strategy. I had posted two of my decks in the original thread, which got vaporized in the board kaplooie, which are examples of that. Both of them were designed around a particular mechanic (nightmares for black and threshold for white) and took advantage of their color's specific strengths, without being overpowering or infallible. For their tactical strengths, they also have weaknesses that can be exploited by an opponent with the right deck.

The white deck that was posted, Vanguard, is built around white's strengths of versatility and smaller, easy to manage creatures. The threshold mechanic allows them to become much stronger later in the game and become a formidable striking or defending force. Ideally, the Vanguard player can be a bit defensive while he builds up to threshold and then unleash his army offensively, being able to match strength with many enemies and outflank the target. But the player himself is still vulnerable to black or red effects that rely on dealing damage to the player and not creatures, and some spells are designed to counteract mechanics like threshold by emptying out the opponent's graveyard. So the Vanguard excels in a certain area and is vulnerable in others, but it's effective enough to be a good general purpose deck. That's part of the fun.

[RJDiogenes]

Dealing damage to the player?

[Unicron]

Yep. Some effects specifically target the opponent's life total. Black and red both specialize in that as part of their preference for damage, while white and blue (and in some cases, green) have spells that will counteract such effects. White and green have life gainers or damage prevention, blue has countering effects.